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Letter: Work to preserve democracy

By Lenice Shaw, Vancouver
Published: July 12, 2022, 6:00am

Thanks to Dennis Allison for his opinion on gerrymandering (“Address gerrymandering,” Our Readers’ Views, July 7). I strongly agree that in order to prevent gerrymandering we need an amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that it should use an objective mathematical methodology to create districts.

However, I would suggest that in order to create impartial districts we try to make the most compact districts, without regard to county lines created in the mid-1800s, existing representatives, race or party. This would be calculated by minimizing the average distance per person to the center of their district. Sounds complicated, but this can be done with computers, and I am sure, in much less time than we have spent on redistricting in Washington since the census.

Please check out the YouTube on this called “Engineering Elections Without Bias” presented by Brian Olson at TEDxCambridge in June 2016. I think we can all agree that the goal we share is a representative democracy and we need an amendment to preserve it.

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